I've never played a Klonoa game before now but I recently obtained Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum for the Wonderswan and beat it in the last few days.

I've seen a lot of criticism of the game online; lack of bosses and the game generally being very easy (although I disagree, it's puzzles are simply easy to understand and satisfying to complete rather than simple) however I'm intrigued by what happens on completion of the game. You unlock a series of 'EX' stages that are so utterly different to the rest of the game as to be almost perverse! While the main game is slightly more taxing than your average Kirby effort the EX stages are insanely hard, requiring a pitch perfect run to complete them combining time and zero mistakes. It had me wondering if this was somekind of perverse joke by the developers as it almost seems to be a preemptive strike on reviewers who would (and did) criticise the main game as too easy.

Anyway, my main question is: how to the other Klonoa games compare to this? Is this a feature of the rest of the series or something unique to the Wonderswan game?

flojocabron wrote:GBA Klonoa are quite different from ps1/ps2 versions.

I've never played the wonderswan one.

Are the GBA games worth getting? What is the level of difficulty like in them? Easy, balanced, hard?

One and two on GBA are very much similar. A 2D platformer like game. it's got an okay difficultly curve. It has a puzzle like feel to it. When you try get every jewel and items in each level. Later levels get a bit tricky. But it's doable.

In response to the original question about unlockable extra hard stages in Klonoa games, Klonoa 2 on the PS2 has a couple of these stages. If I remember right, you had to collect all the things in each stage to unlock them, and there were only two of them. I do remember them being the funnest part of the game though, as they required perfect timing to do things like jump off of 20 enemies in a row. The rest of the game was easier, but still really enjoyable to play through.

I cant remember if the PS1 game had any extra hard unlockable stages like that, but I thought it was a lot more difficult than the PS2 one in general.